This talk will examine the way in which tense, aspect and the perfect are expressed in Malayalam. It begins by arguing that Malayalam has both tense morphology and a TP (contra Amritavalli & Jayaseelan 2005, et seq) and sketches out the beginnings of a tensed account. With respect to the perfect, the talk will show that Malayalam lacks dedicated perfect morphology in (at least) the Universal reading of the perfect. Instead it makes use of simple tense forms that often do not look so simple.